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Saturday, September 03, 2011

Overheard in Roomie's Bedroom:

Roomie is laying back on her bed, watching a documentary about feral hippos in South America. Apparently these things were imported by drug barons and have escaped to the wild where they have set up housekeeping and are tearing up farmland like giant wild hogs and breeding like three-ton rabbits.

Let the free market drive that and you'll take care of the problem real quick. I'm interested to see the effect of Texas legalizing private individuals paying to hunt wild pigs from helicopters. If you can make money at something while you're solving a problem it seems to really work. Imagine that.

Hippo make great eating! Their meat is well marbled, and works spectacularly well in a stroganoff. Must be a couple of decades since last I had it, but I can still remember the taste (with great pleasure, and real longing for more!).

And of the non-carnivores in Africa, these things kill more people than anything else; Capstick had a chapter on them in one of his books. Fast, aggressive, territorial and fighting tusks that are downright awesome in use.

I hadn't heard about the hippos before. I had read that there's a region of Brazil that has Asian Red Water Buffalo; someone wanted water buffalo for farm animals back in the early 1900's and- God knows how, and I mean that truly- the guy they bought calves from shipped them Asian Red's instead of carabou. They got about half-grown, broke out into the swamps and made themselves at home. As somebody put it, "The only predator that can bother them(other than man) is jaguar, and once they're half-grown or more the stupidist jag in the world isn't dumb enough to annoy one.") Capstick made a trip there to hunt one, and said it was one of the hardest and most dangerous huts he'd ever made.

My wife came into the living room when she heard me yelling at the teewee "shoot the damn hippos...shoot the damn hippos" again and again. I dont understand why feral illegally imported former zoo animals are allowed to reproduce like bunnies.

I've done the Cape Buffalo thing, along with some of the less, um, "bite-y, scratchy and stomp-y" things. Hippo is on my list for next time.

Hippo in water, lots of things work fine. Hippo on dry land, then follow the generic rules for "stopping rifles" which seems to be bullets of at least:.45 caliber.300 sectional densitySolid construction2000 fps impact velocity.

a .458 Win is the bottom of the list. My .458 Lott is a little more comfortably over the minimums. On the advise of a very trustworth Professional Hunter I know, I wouldn't try it with a .375 or a .416. Those things kill a lot of hunters when taken on dry land, especially when you manage to get between them and their water. But I will try it on my next trip to Africa, and maybe I can arrange for a trip to S.A. in the interval. All the better if there are Hippies on the license!

"It is my personal opinion that hippo meat is one of the finest of game foods. I had a safari chef who could make s better stroganoff from the thigh-thick interior filets that lie up under the ribs along the spine than you could buy in New York. Just as it would be difficult to describe the taste of beef to a person who had never tried it, so it is with hippo. The taste is mild, less than lamb and more than beef, slightly more marbled than the usual venison. It tastes exactly like, well, hippo."